+17
Pending Review
Control Access install - remove duplicates
Hello,
We use an imaging service to manage our new machines. When we image a laptop, we include the Access install file so as to enable remote control easily. When we re-image a laptop that had Access already installed, it re-installs just fine but it creates a duplicate entry in our Control hub. The old installs are duds and never reconnect to the machine. They are easy to clear out but this is time consuming. Please add a way to have the install file check for a duplicate and either delete the old session or reconnect the install to the old connection.
Thank you!
Customer support service by UserEcho
We have a similar problem. Chassis serial number, CPU serial, and main NIC MAC should be a good start for de-duplicating.
This issue has been on the forums for several years. Is that long enough to consider it a going concern?
Ive been checking these forums on and off for several years now hoping that they would finally implement something and im finding it hard to believe this kinda thing has not been dealt with yet.
We have around 2k-3k of machines, but after years of reimaging Classroom labs every semester i just found out that we have over 6500 machines in Screen Connect?!!! for more than 50% of those machines or sessions are duplicates.
Some are many duplicates for the same machines that have been reimaged over and over, especially test machines, for example some of my techs have a number of test machines and a bunch of t hem had +40 duplicates. Now something like that is easy to clear out since its a bunch of duplicates for 1 machine... but when you have 2-3 duplicates per machine for 2k - 3k of machines then manually removing them becomes a massive time consumption.
I dont have this issue with SCCM or Deep Freeze that manages duplicates based upon MAC addressses.
Ive spent several days manually removing duplicates and ive still barely made a dent in cleaning up this, and now that we added SC Cloud as an additonal to our on-premise ScreenConnect server this is driving me insane!!! :-(
What makes manual removal of ScreenConnect with multiple duplicates for the same machine, especially if that machine is not online or cannot currently contact the server is that it becomes very difficult to tell which was the last current record for the machine, so when removing duplicates it becomes very easy to accidently delete the machine from ScreenConnect, so now i have to look at the last connected dates of thousands of machines, sadly i cannot sort by last connected date for duplicates either *sigh* sorry this has been massively frustrating for me.
Sadly i will be back to this same boat by the end the start of the next semester when i have to reimage all of these labs again.
As Alex said above, 2 years ago, there are several unique items about every computer that could be used to ascertain that it is in fact the same system. Reconnecting a machine that was reimaged (or just renamed) to an existing session is the preferable method.
In fairness, SC deals with a machine being renamed OK - and fairly quickly. Reinstalls of the OS / SC aren't deduplicated though. This should probably be a controllable option, which defaults to deduplicating but can be set to still operate the old way.
How are you doing renames? We see dupes after we rename systems. The old name persists as a separate session.
Just by renaming the machine from the GUI. I thought this just worked - perhaps I'm wrong. I'd need to test to be sure.
We do not use the CW GUI to rename computers. We use a process that is typical for an AD centric IT department. As part of the deployment/preparation for an end user, the built in processes for renaming a Windows workstation are used. This is to ensure that AD/AzureAD are satisfied with proper renaming processes. Since AD is our focus and must absolutely be correct, we would not employ any external method for renaming. Using this method, CW is not satisfied and does not reuse existing sessions.
Also having problems with many duplicate access clients. When computer are reimaged and the client is reinstalled, it creates a duplicate with the same name instead of merging or replacing the old one.
Best solution I have for this so far is to have a report that is based on duplicate serial numbers - whenever I see device count getting above what I would typically see as normal I run the report and pull the old devices. Having an option to replace if serial numbers match would be awesome
How are you running a report on duplicate serial numbers? Can it be done with ScreenConnect alone or are you using other tools?
Install the Report Manager extension
Once you have the report manager installed you can find it by clicking the admin tab > extras blocks at the bottom > report manager
Build a new report with the following settings:
Aggregation Type: Grouped
Report Type: Session
Group Fields: GuestMachineSerialNumber
Select Fields: Count
Filter: SessionType = 'Access' AND NOT IsEnded
Aggregate Filter: Count >1
Item Limit: Currently set at 10,000 but we only have ~ 900 devices so doesn't matter
Save it and then at the top is run options you can either download as a csv or get a download link
Its insane that this thread for something easy for them to add goes unanswered for 5+ years.